Generally, in MDM (master data management) today, member records are linked into entities based on their similarity scores computed from a set of attributes. In many real world applications, a single notion of an entity may not be sufficient.
Generally, the notion of an “entity” varies and depends on the business problem at hand. For example, a “Person” entity may be suitable for some applications, whereas a “Household” entity may be more suitable for other applications. Even if multiple entity types are explicitly specified, current MDM systems do not have a way of finding relationships between these entities, if they exist.
Conventional MDM systems can link each record into a single entity. They cannot support the notion of linking a record into multiple related entity types, so that the same record can be viewed in multiple ways.